This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life by David Foster Wallace

Title: This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
Author: David Foster Wallace
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 978-0316068222
Genre: Non-Fiction, Speech
Pages: 144
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5 stars

I have read quite a few commencement speeches by authors. Authors who celebrate creativity (Rowling), some who talk about making art great again or creating good art (Gaiman) and some others who speak of the future and what it has in store (Saunders). And then there is someone like Foster Wallace who gives it to you the way it is – the real world, with no sugar-coating whatsoever.

I knew that would be the case once I received this backlist title from the good folks at Hachette India. David Foster Wallace has left behind a legacy. A cannon of work that I at least read in bits and pieces because sometimes what he says is too much to bear.

This is Water is a speech given by Foster Wallace to the graduating class at Kenyon College in 2005. He starts with a little parable – the one that seems like one, and quickly goes on to break that mode of starting a commencement speech. David’s speech is a trove of wisdom and compassion, thought provoking, and what it means to live in the 21^st century.

I think the thing about such books that there is no single universal message. There is something that relates with everyone. The message of giving up on the rat-race (is that even possible?), the one that speaks about awareness, self-consciousness before saying or doing what we say or do (this one hit home real hard), or just the one to understand what it means to give and sometimes sacrifice a little bit, if you have to.

David Foster Wallace doesn’t speak of glory in the most basic terms. There is glory in empathy. There is glory in understanding. There is glory in small efforts as he rightly puts it. This is Water is the kind of book that is needed at every stage of life. The speech will resonate throughout.

I will leave you with this thought that is my favourite from this read:

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”

 

 

David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations (The Last Interview Series) by David Foster Wallace

Title: David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations
Author: David Foster Wallace and Others (Interviewers)
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 978-1612192062
Genre: Interviews, Authors
Pages: 128
Source: Personal Copy
Rating: 5 Stars

There is something about David Foster Wallace that you cannot help but want to know more. He was barely forty-six when he committed suicide on September 12, 2008. He had suffered from depression for nearly twenty years and perhaps this was the reason he took his life. At the same time, you know what they say about geniuses, right? There has to be a spot of bother in them – they view the world quite differently from you and I and mostly most of them tend to veer off-course and live life on their terms, though not always to the best of the endings.

The Last Interview and Other Conservations is a wonderful concept introduced by Melville House Publishing. The series features a lot of writers and their last interviews – from Bradbury to Marquez to Vonnegut even, also Hemingway if you please. I have read most of them and then I decided it was the turn of David Foster Wallace. In these brief interviews, you will get a strong sense of the man and more importantly of the writer. Wallace seems so elusive – it’s almost like there is so much going on inside his head and you don’t have access to all of it – that is kind of frustrating but extremely interesting.

His views on things everything modern, political and technological is hilarious and often melancholic as well. Every individual interview in this collection brings another side to the writer and more so his works. At the same time, there is this overwhelming sense of gloom which pervades DFW and his works – one cannot seem to shake that off for sure, and that is more evident in these last set of conversations. I honestly feel that if you want to know more about the man, after reading some of his books, then this is the best place to start.